Salesforce Beefs up Desk.com Customer Support Software

An agent console that centralizes customer support information is one of the new features in the latest iteration of Salesforce's Desk.com customer support software.

Salesforce.com offers customer support options in its Sales Cloud and its Service Cloud, as can be seen in this explanatory blog post by Salesforce partner akaCRM.

Both, however, are likely a bit too complex for smaller companies. For them, Salesforce since January 2012 has offered Desk.com, a product built on technology gained from its 2011 acquisition of customer support specialist Assistly.

Because companies of all sizes are challenged to provide customer support in traditional channels like the telephone and email as well as newer social channels, Salesforce has tweaked the Desk.com software, adding an agent console that centralizes information needed to resolve customer issues and provides access to rules, workflows and templates.

Other new features include a reporting engine that offers more sophisticated customer service metrics for managers, including the ability to identify trends in real-time, and a mobile app that makes it possible to add notes, update support statuses and assign cases on mobile devices. According to Salesforce, Desk.com now also includes ten times more APIs that can be used to gather data from other applications and give companies a fuller view of customer activity.

Companies using Desk.com include HotelTonight, One Kings Lane and SoundCloud. Alexis Chapman, director of Customer Operations for One Kings Lane, said in a statement that the product has helped One Kings Lane maintain high customer satisfaction rates. The company's customer care team is "empowered to work more efficiently and continually offer an exceptional experience for our shoppers," Chapman said.

Desk.com commissioned research that found that its customers on average experience a 42 percent faster response to customers, 38 percent increase in agent productivity, 27 percent decrease in support costs and 36 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

The software is available now, with pricing starting at $30 per month, per agent. The mobile app for iPhone and iPad can now be downloaded at the Apple App Store. Salesforce will add support for Android devices in the fall of 2014.